I didn’t intend to go to Occupy Oakland yesterday. I knew there was a mass march but I was waiting for the delivery of our new cheap Ikea bed after our old cheap Ikea bed broke, and I had already resigned myself to a Saturday filled with fighting with confusing furniture directions and fingers made bloody by screws and hammers. But then I watched the disturbing video of police shooting pepper spray down the throats of peaceful student protesters at U.C. Davis, and I couldn’t just sit at my computer and watch anymore. I couldn’t just follow the Twitter hashtags or watch the livefeeds, I had to be there myself. The Davis video was graphic obviously, and outrageous, but somehow it touched something in me that the other reports of police brutality and civil injustice had been reaching towards for months. I haven’t been sleeping well, kept up at night stricken with worry about the direction of our country, fretting over the ease with which police have begun to apply violent force to law-abiding young people with legitimate grievances, worried about the future and if this really is a class war and if it’s even safe to have babies in this world anymore, which is maybe an over-exaggeration but at 3am in the dark under the covers it seems like a legitimate fear. So after seeing that video I knew what I had to do: I had to reschedule the delivery and I had to wrap a scarf around my mouth and I had to go down to Oakland and see what the movement was really about.